If you are looking for a simple solution to make your dimmable lights smart the Tuya smart dimmer switch might be the right solution. I tested this Zigbee switch with Home Assistant, ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. The Tuya smart light switch The Tuya smart light switch (sometimes sold under the Moes Read more…
Smart lightbulbs are great but they get quite dumb really quickly when you toggle the light switch. The Aqara H1 switch can fix this issue. It works with Zigbee in Home Assistant, either with ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT and has a special decoupled mode for usage with smart lights. The Aqara Read more…
How do you add an existing doorbell to your smart home? I did it by connecting it to a modified Aqara door sensor. Now a ring will flash lights, send a message to my phone or do anything else I want it to – with all the power of Home Read more…
Prometheus works great for collecting server stats on a Raspberry Pi but was missing some information on a Raspberry Pi in docker stats and the cadvisor used more CPU than the containers it was monitoring. Here is how fixed those issues. Cleaning up & fixing the downloaded dashboards When I Read more…
To analyze errors or just to watch what is happening: your smart home gets so much better with some proper monitoring. Prometheus + Grafana is one of THE solutions for monitoring pretty much anything. Getting it to run on a Raspberry Pi does not need much time but still can Read more…
Open source software like Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant are a great alternative to (more or less) closed systems like Philips Hue. It can be tricky to get started though. Here is a quick start guide allowing you to use all the advantages like full offline control and the possibility to Read more…
I love my Grafana dashboard to see everything important in my smart home on glance. Using rows and the modern time series panel makes it even better. Let me show you how I updated my dashboard. Grafana dashboards Grafana is this awesome open tool to create dashboards. I have set Read more…
InfluxDB (1.8) is a great database but it logs every web access as an error by default. This creates a lot of error entries in a log aggregation tool like Loki. There is a simple fix though. Loki & log aggregation Loki is a great tool to aggregate logs from Read more…
The Grafana Loki logging aggregator is a great tool to collect logs from lots of places (Docker containers) in one place. Loki log size can unfortunately grow quite big though with the default settings. When my Raspberry Pis SD card was nearly full I looked for some ways to combat Read more…
I wanted a giant map of the world on my wall so built one. Around 2,5m by 2m in size and with smart background LED lights. Here is how its done. The idea It all started with one of those ideas again: how about some nice combination of “art” and Read more…